In this issue we draw upon historical, political, and artistic reflections on the New Deal era in ways that both offer a richer understanding of that historical moment and provide a fuller basis for reflecting on our current crossroads in American life. Standing at another moment of crisis, facing once again economic hardship and political division, the importance of this historically themed discussion is palpable.
In this issue, part of an ongoing series co-edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young, we feature new scholarship on nineteenth-century European art, including Michael Fried on Géricault, Balzac, and “the limit case of absorption”; Laura Kalba on Rossetti, Ruskin, and political economy; Claire Moran on Morisot and the plein-air interior; Stephanie O’Rourke on John Martin and infrastructure; and Harmon Siegel on subjectivity and style. Also featured is the first English-language version of Fritz Novotny’s essay “Das Problem des Menschen Cézanne im Verhältnis zu seiner Kunst” (1932), translated by Carmen Rosenberg-Miller as “The Problem of Cézanne the Person in Relation to His Art.”
“Signature Event Context” has proved to be Derrida’s most enduring essay. New fields have been founded on its basis, and it is his only work to address at length a text by a philosopher not from the Continental tradition. Occasioned by the passing of “Signature’s” fiftieth anniversary, the present issue, edited by Joshua Kates, includes essays from scholars with a range of sympathies to Derrida’s project. Their articles focus less on purely scholarly concerns and instead on the truth about questions raised by Derrida’s essay: of textual identity, the role of intention and citation, the status of fictional and historical discourses, and the work of interpretation. A series of interchanges between Walter Benn Michaels, Henry Staten, and Joshua Kates, commenting on Michaels’s essay, are also included, which pursue further this attempt to get at the things themselves.
In this issue we feature a series of interlocking essays on the self-imposed limitations on political thinking by Sam Gindin, Mike Macnair, Adolph Reed with an introduction by John-Baptiste Oduor. In addition is a feature on the Shards by Willard Boepple with an essay by Michael Fried as well as two essays on problems in contemporary art theory by Ian Verstegen—on aesthetic ideologies of “vibrant matter”—and Diarmuid Costello on Thierry de Duve’s account of Kant.
Essays on race and labor, then and now, by Adolph Reed, Thomas J. Mann and Oliver Cox as well as a series of ongoing studies of Modern Architecture in California by Alex Ross, Christopher Long and Pierluigi Serraino.
In this issue scholars address the underexamined writings of literary critic Hugh Kenner.
Inside the issue
This issue is devoted to new approaches to lesser-known architecture and design at mid-century. Examining a range of practices at mid-century, all of them within a highly politicized landscape, these essays explore Otto Neurath’s studies in scientific management, Bruno Mathsson’s Solar Architecture, reconceptions of building art for the uninhabited wilderness, the incredible story of the intersection of the work of Alden B. Dow and Dow Chemical, and a study of the contrasting approaches to architectural photography in the work of Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller. Finally, Adolph Reed cuts through the ideological jargon of Afropessimism.
Inside the issue You May Also Like Issue #39: Art/Race/Theory/Practice
The second in a pair of issues featuring new scholarship and essays on contemporary art, a professional-managerial enterprise. Edited by Elise Archias.
The first in a pair of issues featuring new scholarship and essays on contemporary art, a professional-managerial enterprise. Edited by Elise Archias.
In this issue we focus on debates—new and old—in the legal and literary sphere, examining topics ranging from birtherism, plea bargaining, forensic architecture and evidence, and robotic free speech. Edited by Lisa Siraganian and Rachel Watson.
This is the third in a series of issues featuring new scholarship on nineteenth- and eighteenth-century art.
Essays on the current state of politics in Brazil, Racial ideology in the NFL, and the prospects of Deneocolonizing the University.
Essays on Kleist, Impressionism, Adorno, and Racism as Disorder.
In “The Trouble with Disparity” Reed and Michaels critique the normative approach to politics today; Responses to Michaels on Anscombe and Art; Michael Fried on Thomas Struth’s Technology Photographs; Ken Warren on the poetics of BLM; Dani Follett on John Cage; and Nicholas Brown enters The Tank.
Inside the issue You May Also Like Issue #24: The Neoliberal Coup
In this issue authors engage the history and future of the labor movement (returning to the example of Judith Stein), the necessity for a jobs programs, and the neoliberalization of biomedical research and of the nonviolent resistance movement spearheaded by Gene Sharp.
In this second installment of work inspired by the example of Judith Stein we include essays by Preston Smith II on New Urban Renewal, Touré Reed on Lester Granger, Thomas Adams on Stein, Cedric Johnson on David Roediger, and Anton Jaeger on David Graeber.
Inside the issue You May Also Like Issue #27: The Nineteenth Century (Part Two)
This is the second in a series of issues featuring new scholarship on nineteenth-century art. Edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young. Editorial Assistant: Luke Naessens.
Inside the issue You May Also Like Issue #40: New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century
Inside the issue You May Also Like Issue #31: Architecture
Inside the issue You May Also Like Issue #20: Political and Aesthetic Post-Mortem
In this issue we address the various ways in which class has been naturalized by popular political alternatives. As Warren, Reed, Legette, and Michaels argue, there is a class politics to antiracism, which has been mostly expunged from public debate. Grasso considers the rehabilitative ideology of the prison system, Sowa the stakes of the new populism. Finally, Cronan and Palermo look at a current variant of neoliberalism in art history.
For fifty years, Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” has set the terms for the discussion of minimalism, or as he prefers to call it, literalism. More than just a commentary on a controversial set of works that challenged and largely eclipsed high modernism, “Art and Objecthood” has itself remained the subject of intense debate since it was first published in Artforum. It raises questions about the nature of art, of experience, of criticism, and of the relation of history to all of the above. For some of us, partisans as well as opponents of Fried’s views, “Art and Objecthood” is inevitable–a challenge that cannot be avoided. The essays and appreciations gathered in this issue offer variety. They are by “Art and Objecthood”‘s admirers, if not partisans, and suggest the breadth of ways its challenge can be felt and met. Fried’s battle with minimalism may be a topic for art historical study, but we are not finished reading “Art and Objecthood” yet. The discussion continues here.
For fifty years, Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” has set the terms for the discussion of minimalism, or as he prefers to call it, literalism. More than just a commentary on a controversial set of works that challenged and largely eclipsed high modernism, “Art and Objecthood” has itself remained the subject of intense debate since it was first published in Artforum. It raises questions about the nature of art, of experience, of criticism, and of the relation of history to all of the above. For some of us, partisans as well as opponents of Fried’s views, “Art and Objecthood” is inevitable–a challenge that cannot be avoided. The essays and appreciations gathered in this issue offer variety. They are by “Art and Objecthood”‘s admirers, if not partisans, and suggest the breadth of ways its challenge can be felt and met. Fried’s battle with minimalism may be a topic for art historical study, but we are not finished reading “Art and Objecthood” yet. Our next issue will continue the discussion.
In this issue we offer reflections on “white working class” ideology and neoliberal history; on the ideology of craft at the Venice Biennale; on the contested meanings of formalism; three unpublished pieces by Allen Grossman; Michael Fried on “Encountering ‘September Sky’”; new poetry; and reviews of Lisa Florman on Kandinsky and Jill Cassid on the Enlightenment Subject.
In the spring of 2015 nonsite.org in collaboration with the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA) hosted a two-day conference on Photography and Philosophy. For our 19th issue nonsite.org presents essays related to that event. These essays engage with what we take to be central issues in the history and practice of photography today including the autonomy of the photographic image, automatism, time and meaning.
The subject of trained artistic gesture or of the ganzfeld chamber; understanding itself within liberal ideology or within a crisis of man. This issue considers the relation of the subject to various cultures—psychological, political, historical.
The essays in this issue take the 10th and 50th anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and the Moynihan Report as an opportunity to examine the implications of culturalist understandings of poverty — and, in particular, Black poverty — advanced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and widely reiterated for the City of New Orleans.
The essays in this issue consider various ways we–our problems and works–emerge from and in our situation and the ways this fact can be figured in our poems and our paintings, and in our responses to them.
In June of 2014, nonsite.org, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, sponsored four fellows to do research in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Danowski’s synoptic ambition—to collect literally all poetry in English published in the 20th century, including the independent journals, short-run chapbooks and broadsides that gave modernism its distinctive energy—has created an opportunity to examine the materials out of which our accounts of the century have been made, without the influence of a shaping hand.
The work of our B-Side Fellows, presented here, takes the shapelessness of “everything” as a provocation to investigate the divergences between canonical accounts of modernism in poetry; to explore the many roads not taken, whether they manifest in the unedited arc of a career, in the one-off achievement, or the unclassified ephemera of a moment. What else might modernism have been? And how do such reconsiderations of modernism bear on what happens on the flip side of the mid-century divide? Edited by Jennifer Ashton and Oren Izenberg.
In this issue, nonsite features new work on 19th-century French art and visual culture, from telegraphy to lithography, Orientalists to Post-Impressionists, Manet to Degas. Edited by Bridget Alsdorf.
In nonsite’s thirteenth issue, we turn to the contemporary relationship between literature and politics in Latin America today. Edited by Eugenio Di Stefano and Emilio Sauri.
In nonsite’s 12th issue, a collection of views on the meaning and uses of postcolonial theory in and around modern Poland, plus photography and ’sixties Paris and a feature essay on Thomas Piketty’s celebrated Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
The following six essays are intended as three exchanges around three topics—the autonomy of the photographic image, automatism, and time and meaning—that will be the themes of three panels in a two-day conference at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 13 and 14, 2015.
The conference is sponsored by the museum and by the Mellon Foundation and is being organized by nonsite.org. We are looking for creative approaches to these themes that will engage with works in the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection at LACMA. Send proposals for session papers to nonsite@nonsite.org. Proposals must be submitted by November 15, 2014.
In nonsite’s tenth issue, we revisit the work of Bertolt Brecht and assess its relevance for today.
Nonsite’s 9th issue focuses on working conditions in higher education. Edited by Victoria H.F. Scott.
In this issue, nonsite turns its attention to music.
New accounts of Picasso, Léger, Beckmann, Pollock, Bearden and we ask: What are the stakes of formalism today?
This issue is loosely the result of a double session on Intention and Interpretation at the College Art Association meeting of February 2010. The line-up of speakers was somewhat different from the authors of this special issue, but these remarks describe the developments to which both sets of papers address themselves. Thierry de Duve, Michael Garral, Stephen Melville, and Walter Benn Michaels were all participants in the sessions and contributed arguments substantially like those they present here. David Summers was scheduled to take part, but was unable to attend the gathering in 2010. Samuel Wheeler contributes an entirely new piece on the topic.
Also in this issue, Molly Warnock on the pliages of Simon Hantaï.
In this issue Michael Fried, Ruth Leys, and Robert Pippin look at aspects of the relation between our agency–our actions, or emotions, our character–and our experience–of the world, of ourselves, of each other.
Two special features consider writing on cubism–Kevin Chua on Christopher Green and Lisa Florman on Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and T.J. Clark.
This issue of nonsite presents the continuation of a conversation between literary scholars and philosophers, revisiting the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy in a modern disciplinary context. These essays are revised and extended versions of papers originally delivered at “No Quarrel: Literature and Philosophy Today,” a conference organized at Boston University in April, 2011 by Robert Chodat and Oren Izenberg, and sponsored by the BU Humanities Foundation. The first five essays may be viewed here.
This issue of nonsite.org presents a conversation between literary scholars and philosophers, revisiting the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy in a modern disciplinary context. These essays are revised and extended versions of papers originally delivered at “No Quarrel: Literature and Philosophy Today,” a conference organized at Boston University in April, 2011 by Robert Chodat and Oren Izenberg, and sponsored by the BU Humanities Foundation. Half of the essays appear now; five more will appear in November, along with responses to the issues they raise.
In a special dossier, contributors present claims for and against neuro-, cognitive, and evolutionary aesthetics. Edited by Todd Cronan.
We present nonsite’s inaugural issue.
nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities. nonsite.org is affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
